What to do while AI generates

I kicked off a Claude Code session this morning. A big frontend refactor across early.tools repos, estimated 14 minutes of compute. Opened a new tab. Thumb already hovering over the X bookmark. Caught it. Closed the tab. Sat there for a second, slightly annoyed. The model goes off and does 20 minutes of what used to take two hours. You’re not typing, not thinking. You’re just… there. Doom-scrolling slides in like it owns the time. I’ve started calling it Zwischenzeit: German for the time between. The window that opens when you kick off an agentic task and closes when the output lands back in your lap. Zwischenzeit (n.) — the idle time an AI agent creates between your prompt and its result. Two minutes for a small request. Twenty minutes for a full Claude Code run. An hour if you’re chaining. Two years ago it didn’t exist. Now it’s most of my workday. What you do inside it is the new game. Why doom-scrolling is the worst filler It feels like rest. It isn’t. Short-form video, X,…